61–70 of 153 posts
When see things like this, I always think of the Chinese proverb "An inch of time is worth an inch of gold, but it is hard to buy one inch of time with one inch of gold" Which always says to me that its not worth it just use the quickest option Take the example drcongo posted: "Yesterday I had to drive to a nearby town, just 20 minutes away, and noticed that every single petrol station there was a good 5p per litre c…
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I almost never go out of my way for fuel, because as you say, it's rarely worth it once you factor in your time (never mind the fuel spent). But it's still useful to know about price variation so that you can plan ahead. I regularly drive past several different petrol stations, and if I know that one of them is usually cheaper or usually more expensive then I choose to use or avoid it, or to decide that I'll fill up…
totally agree, technology could make this much more cost effective (or time effective). what's the best use of my time versus the cheaper option.. It's interesting running the numbers though. e.g. if it only take 10 minutes to get cheaper fuel, how much cheaper does it need to be for your time to be worth more than the UK minimum wage (£12.21 for adults over 21) based on my maths (from above calculations) it needs to…
A 7p per litre difference does sound like the difference between local station and motorway prices though, and they probably will have factored in that opportunity cost of time...
They have a REST API for the stations... Great. But they also need a little WebUI for stations to manually update prices, since small stations won't have a programmer on staff to do this stuff.
More unnecessary meddling, this causes price convergence so anyone living close to a typically lower cost source of fuel is going to have an almost imperceptible increase in relative cost. They certainly love spending taxpayer money on nothing don't they.
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Providing better price information makes a market work better.
In the above model prices converge on a mean, reducing the potential savings for those that price really matters (the poor are the ones most likely to check existing price discovery sites), thus it's regressive - the government are either seeing it as an opportunity to marginally increase tax rake, or more likely are oblivious to the externality of the poor bearing the burden.
People who are price sensitive can discover cheaper alternatives more easily; others still won't bother
What are the price variations like over short distances? In the US gasoline short distance price variations are ridiculous. I've seen it where one station was $3.50/gal and another station on the same main road just a 30 second drive away was $4.30/gal. These two stations almost always have a large difference like that. This kind of large difference over a small distance is common all over the country. Yet a surprisi…
This is neat, great use of public data, and just in time for the ICE phaseout starting within a decade.
Set's an good precedent for places that offer electric charging having to do the same thing in future though.
Is anyone else getting a 403 from this URL?